First The Bad News…

The AP is reporting that Arctic Ice melt has reached a tipping point, and is tipping now with melting accelerating at a time of year when it usually slows.

Controversial claims, so I’ll cite the article at length:

“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the data center, in Boulder, Colo. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”

Five climate scientists, four of them specialists on the Arctic, told The Associated Press that it was fair to call what was happening in the Arctic a “tipping point.”

Last year was an unusual year when wind currents and other weather conditions coincided with global warming to worsen sea ice melt, Dr. Serreze said. Scientists wondered if last year was an unusual event or the start of a new and disturbing trend.

This year’s results suggest the latter because the ice had recovered a bit more than usual thanks to a somewhat cooler winter, Dr. Serreze said. Then this month, when the melting rate usually slows, it sped up instead, he said.

….

On top of that, researchers are investigating “alarming” reports in the last few days of the release of methane from long-frozen Arctic waters, possibly from the warming of the sea, said Bill Hare, a Greenpeace climate scientist, who was attending a climate conference in Ghana. Giant burps of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, is a long-feared effect of warming in the Arctic that would accelerate warming even more, according to scientists.

Over all, the picture of what is happening in the Arctic is getting worse, said Bob Corell, who headed a multinational scientific assessment of Arctic conditions a few years ago. “We’re moving,” he said, “beyond a point of no return.”

Disturbingly, the fastest-melting point is the Chukchi Sea, where the Bush administration has proposed granting oil companies waivers for the effects of their operations on threatened polar bears. Ten percent of all remaining polar bears live in the Chukchi. Reconnaissance teams for those companies recently saw nine polar bears swimming in open waters. At least one was 65 miles off the shore, and many were “swimming north, apparently trying to reach the polar ice edge, which on that day was 400 miles away.”